Thanks for the answer!

Thanks for the answer ! So if I have some friends and contacts that have mental health issue, I guess it would be relevant to provide them these kind of apps (at least in complement)? Do you have in mind some apps that would be better than others ? (Thought Saver is there I guess)

Thanks for the post. This sounds worth exploring and quite promising, especially if it works.

It's quite impressive that it may be about 60-70% as effective compared to guided therapy.

I was just wondering about one element that I think could be more clear. What kind of unguided self-help apps are you talking about? Are they already widespread? Are we talking about Thought Saver or Waking Up or something like that ? I think a little example of such an app and how it works at the beginning could provide a bit more clarity.

Thanks for the calculator.

I was wondering about the welfare part of the equation, and it's not obvious how people get their welfare estimates in the calculator, from what I see in the post.

Are we talking about the welfare of just humans ? Animals ? (Farmed or wild animals)? Artificial sentience ? How do we reconcile all of these when we're not sure today whether global welfare is net positive ?

Of course, this depends on very important questions that are hard to assess. What are the consequences of bringing wild animals suffering to our planet? Is factory farming going to continue for a long time, especially as that long-termists are very optimistic about technology replacing all forms of animal farming, where it's not so obvious? Are artificial sentience going to have lives worth living ? How are we going to impact animals on other planets ?

So overall, what should we include in the 'welfare' part of the calculator?

My prior would be that unless you check extremely frequently, this sounds like a lot of suffering. But not sure about the other options.

I'm still kind of unconvinced. If we were talking only about human populations, sure then I'd agree, most efforts seem intended to provoke good things. But when you look at other species ? I think if you look at the things we do to factory farmed animals or wild animals or animals we just harm because of pollutions or climate change or deep see mining when it starts, we'd label all of that to be bad if it were done to humans.

I'm more interested in actual track record rather than intentions. Our intentions don't match up super well with 'overall good in the world increasing'.

One important reason we might do more bad than good in the future is because animals are far more numerous than humans, and most likely dominate from a moral standpoint (besides maybe artificial sentence). Most importantly, our goals are often opposed to theirs : finding more energy, using fossil fuels, using chemicals for making goods, eating meat, making silk, clearing a forest for agriculture and cities... So as we aggregate even more energy, it's unlikely that our actions are going to be beneficial to animal's goals given our own objectives.

I am not sure this is the case?

I mean, factory farming is in itself an obvious counterexample. It's huge and growing.

I think you are putting too much value on intentions rather than consequences. A lot of harm happening in the world is the result of indifference than cruelty - most people do not actively animals to be harmed, but the most economical way to farm animals is by getting them in crowded conditions, so... 

Poor incentives and competition are important here. A lot of suffering is even natural (e.g., a deer dying of hunger or a spider trapping an insect), and sometimes just unwanted (e.g. climate change).   

Yes, "prove" is too strong here, that's not the term I should have used. And human life is not guaranteed to be net-negative.

 But I often see the view that some people assume human action in the future to be net-positive, and I felt like adding a counterpoint to that, given the large uncertainties.

About point 1, you'd first need to prove that the expected value of the future is going to be positive, something which does not sound guaranteed, especially if factory farming were to continue in the future.

Regarding point 2, note that clean meat automatically winning in the long term is really not guaranteed either:

Longtermists tend to be super optimistic that alternative proteins and cultured meat will be more efficient and cheaper, baffling people working in animal welfare.

I recommend reading that post, Optimistic longtermist would be terrible for animals.

Nice post, thanks ! 

I explains several elements that I find frustrating: science is supposed to provide useful knowledge we can use improve ourselves and the world, but wow, it's so hard to actually extract readily usable knowledge out of a bunch scientific papers, since so much is written in a form not adequate to the human brain.

I really like this article on the topic : 

Scientific production and communication cannot be seen as separate tasks: they are one and the same thing.

Science is, after all, a human enterprise and it has to be understood in human terms, otherwise it becomes a baroque accumulation of decorative items, just like gold in the paws of a dragon.
Henri Poincaré : "Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones. But an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house"